To a girl from the red clay knobs, the bayous of Louisiana seem a strange and wonderful place, as harshly beautiful in their watery way as the high desert. They are also the home of the Cajuns, the French immigrants driven out of what is now the Canadian province of Nova Scotia (then called Acadia; Cajun is a corruption of Acadian). The Cajuns made a world for themselves in the bayous: a way of speech that harks back to their French roots, a cuisine that makes use of what they can fish and hunt and raise from the land, and tales that still carry the savor of their original home in France. (A great introduction to those tales is HAUNTED BAYOU AND OTHER CAJUN GHOST STORIES by the storyteller J.J. Reneaux.)

One of the most fearsome creatures in French folklore is the loup-garou, the dreaded werewolf, who can change from human to wolf under certain conditions. In France, in a werewolf panic that began around 1520 and lasted over a century, some thirty thousand people were tried and burned as werewolves, accused (among other things) of killing humans and eating their flesh while in their wolf form.

The werewolf legend lies at the heart of Carolyn Haines's 2007 novel FEVER MOON, which I just finished reading this morning. Set in a nameless town in New Iberia parish (the setting also for James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux novels) in 1944, the story begins with a murder: the death of Henri Bastion, the richest, most politically powerful, and most corrupt man in the parish, found ripped to pieces with a small blood-covered woman named Adele Hebert standing over him. The people of the swamps, egged on by Adele's sister Bernadette, a troublemaking associate of Bastion's named Praytor Bless, and their knowledge of the legends of their fathers about the loup-garou, erupt in a frenzy, a frenzy only heightened when a child disappears in the night.

The one person who doesn't believe in the legend is a sheriff's deputy named Raymond Thibodeaux, a veteran still carrying the shrapnel that nearly killed him in the still-raging Second World War; he has seen the evil men can do and knows they need no help from a legend to commit the most depraved acts against each other. He is certain that Adele was not the murderer of Henri Bastion, and the bulk of the story is devoted to his efforts to prove her innocence.

It takes a lot for a book to give me the shivers. This one did: the mix of folklore, the descriptions of the dark and foreboding Bayou Teche, and the characters living out the fears of their ancestors, is one I'll not easily forget.

Stephen King once cheerfully admitted that his criteria were simple in his writing: if he could not terrify, he would horrify, and if he could not horrify, he's not too proud to go for the grossout. Haines doesn't have to go for the grossout; she simply stands your hair on end with a dense haunting prose that brings to life our atavistic fear of what might lurk in the dark--a fear common to all cultures.

If you can find this one, it's worth a read.

And if anybody comes looking for me, I'll be in a corner somewhere with a book.